Can science and religion get along?
With thanks to Stanley Fish for an utterly uninspiring and banal essay on an old topic (now ahile ago - I've been busy) I decided to write my own essay.
The answer, if you want to win a big sum of money from the Templeton Foundation, is a creative way of saying yes. But, if you don't care about the Templeton money, you wonder why people keep asking the question if science and religion are so compatible.
Maybe the constant bickering is really a way of venting tension between two lovers who have been together in the same space too long. My Grandparents used to bicker like that.
I don't think it's an old married couple phenomenon. I think the question is posed badly. Let me explain.
To see what I mean, it's worth thinking about other ways to pose the question, such as How have science and religion been getting along recently? Some time has passed since Nietzsche declared that God is dead, but some more recent atheists have taken up an attack on the modern brand of religious faith, including Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation), and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) who have joined up with Daniel Dennett and playfully called themselves the four horsemen of the apocalypse. In my opinion, Harris is the best writer of the bunch. The responses to these recent books have been blistering from across the religious spectrum, including responses from some famous atheists. Obviously, they touched a nerve.
Another dull question is: How do so many scientists manage to be religious? The answer is that, although many scientists are atheists, many scientists do believe in God and some of them are deeply religious, thank you very much. Thank you very much sometimes means that they're sometimes not very happy about being asked the question so often, because it's not really polite conversation among people who care about polite conversation, but it tends to get resurrected (sorry) every time there's a conversation about science and religion.
Biologists tend to believe in God less than other kinds of scientists, but why should this be true? (According to a survey of the members of National Academy of Sciences, 95% of the biologists called themselves atheists or agnostics.)
Maybe atheists decide to study biology. Another answer is that biology, more than any other science, deals with the stuff of religion, including life and death.
The study of life is in greater peril of treading on deeply held truths about self, gender and identity, and origins. These are same kind of basic questions that make up religion.
"Deeply held" is a modern kind of taboo, but science is, if nothing else, brutally honest. Individual scientists can decide to avoid taboo subjects, but science overall does not. Someone out there will take on the taboo.
Herein lies the problem. Any claim that can be falsified will eventually become interesting to a scientist, and so scientists go around scrutinizing things that have, for centuries, been lying there mostly avoiding attention.
But why shouldn't the careful scrutiny of life itself lead one closer to God, and not turn people into atheists? The careful study of life turns over stones where God's face should be, but instead of God, you see worms, stonefly nymphs, and planaria. Instead of budding ministers, you find a brand of scientist fascinated with molecules, genes, and evolutionary history.
I think there's a right way to ask the question that applies to biologists. Instead of asking whether religion and science can get along, it's better to ask whether religion can get along with life. To put it another way, does the careful scrutiny of life actually create conflicts with religion or just draw attention to those conflicts?
The first step in science is careful observation, but that first step also applies to a whole world of activities that wouldn't be called science. To do science, you have to look for ways to test theories about your observations, but some observations flat out contradict the old religious beliefs. If careful observation of life leads you to question religion, even before you started testing any theories, then can you really blame science?
What I'm asking here is whether the conflicts between religion come from science or from the stuff that scientists study. Since the first part of being a scientist is carefully observing the stuff, then the question can be asked is whether religion survives the first step of careful careful observation. No one alive would claim that careful observation is sufficient to characterize science, so it's nothing intrinsic about a systematic method.
Maybe I should stop being vague and cite an example. Take a basic passage from the Bible (Genesis 1:27, KJV): "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
Many people interpret this verse to mean that God created men and women, and so sex and gender roles come from God. But this view of the world leaves out the people who are neither man nor woman. There are many people among us who are neither strictly male nor strictly female by any biological definition that would satisfy all of us. Take Caster Semenya, for example.
But the Bible says that God made male and female humans, so who made the other people? Either the Bible or your interpretation of it is wrong. All of this follows on from simply observing the world as it is with a kind of careful attention to detail. No biology needs to be done, although substantial amounts have be done to describe the potential genotypes and the translation from genotype into phenotype. The conflicts, though, aren't comeing from the biology. The conflicts are coming from the observation themselves and from a simple kind of religious logic.
So, if the biologist studies the biology of human sexual phenotypes and carefully builds up observations about the underlying genetic and other reasons for ambiguously gendered people, and then points out that living things tend to be highly variable in the expression of everything, including traits used to determine sex, then it treads on the idea of sacred gender roles.
But why blame the biologist? All we did is draw attention to the details that religion has tried to sweep under a rug.
The real culprit undermining religion isn't science, it's life itself.
The bigger problem is that reality and religion don't jive. Anyone who is good at carefully observing the world comes to that conclusion.
But I don't want to ask a different question for every kind of scientist where the contradictions come from the basic stuff they study: "Can the universe and religion get along?" for physicists and cosmologists, or "Can earth and religion get along?" for geologists. I'll ask it another way.
"Can religion get along with the careful scrutiny of stuff?"
The universe and the earth are a few billion years old. Life and humans evolved. Nothing in the Bible or any other religion predicted the truth about the origins of the universe and life.
Scientists are just the ones who systematically and carefully observe the world, so we get the blame for pointing out the deficiencies of religion, the ones that are intrinsically contradicted by reality.
You could say that I'm demolishing a straw man but which man of straw do you mean? The cartoon version of religion that comes from reading the bible as it was written, or the bad fiction based on the things that people wish the bible had said, also known as theology? Or perhaps you mean God. Talk about your straw man.